The Song of Eliot’s Perfecto Cigar

A melancholy season entraps you and I
with a dash of cold, leaves curling brown, a stark blue sky.
We sit around the dinning table
talking of TV movies, and mean streets,
the price of bananas, summer retreats,
and of cheap Sicilian Grand hotels.
We yearn for south sea oyster-shells,
for warm days gone, yet end with existential argument;
Where are we going, what to do, what is our intent
in running from here? Silly question
Mr Burbank, with your Baedeker, isn’t it?
Well, its time to end this visit.
It was nice, we must go;
I can’t paint like Michelangelo

Grand, this sense of captivity, scratching at window-panes
to open. Then Rush! Break all the window-panes;
our lives need more air, more in the evening
than an ad riddled TV show that drains
our spirits; aspirations rising through chimneys
like smoke. Knowing we must leap
out of ourselves into the night
exultant, we’re lulled, and fall asleep.

What are the higher causes? Every time
we reach up we’re dumped on the street
like soggy underwear, while priestly ghosts at the window-panes
chuckle. ‘It’s time’
says Mr Bleistein, with a cigar, ‘to meet
the bigot who will assail you, create
despised under-classes, and raise despairing hands’
No thanks, we’ve enough on our plate,
don’t need his holy distinctions that disparage me
don’t need to resolve religious indecisions;
our lives don’t need revisions.
Please, put out your cigar, and stay for tea.

No matter how this poem will go,
I never could paint like Michelangelo.